Day 345

William Kentridge, the South African artist, is a genius.

I spent two hours in an exhibition today and was finally dragged away by Nick.

Kentridge is exactly the same age as I am, had a similar upbringing in South Africa, but he has made his fortune with art.  The most versatile of artists, he does theatre, opera, animated film, and images like etchings and sugar-lift with drypoint.  The example here is a sugar-lift.

In an interview, Kentridge said, "We have an uneasy relationship to our bodies. John Updike refers to us as “the herders of our bodies, which are beasts as dumb and bald and repugnant as cattle.” We prod them along, hoping they will not suddenly go off on their own, leap a fence, wander onto the highway."  The last sentence by Kentridge is funny, but I don't find cattle repugnant, they are rather beautiful, ambling along with those big eyes and calm demeanours, dotting the green fields, grazing, as though nothing else mattered.

He uses his own body as a model most of the time, because he needs a reference for gestures,  for the "folds of flesh which are difficult to predict" which I was pleased to hear because I am the same!  I always had the idea that true artists should be able to draw anything from their imaginations, like one of my 12th grade students, who is absolutely brilliant, drawing anything at all, and everything in perspective always.  But Kentridge requires a model constantly, and because his film work is stop-motion, he would have to have a model on hand almost all the time.  He discovered that charcoal drawing, which is generally used as a preface to a painting, was the perfect medium for stop-motion, because instead of drawing a whole vast number of drawings, which is generally the case within this medium, he only has a few, on which he erases (he called it "rubbing-out, which made me smile at this old South Africanism from my childhood, when erasers were still called 'rubbers') and re-draws continually, leaving interesting marks that add to the movement, e.g. a paper flying off in the wind down the street, obviously leaves a faint trail of each drawn location on the page, as though the paper itself had left its own flight pattern in the air for a brief moment.  

While I sat and watched six of his short films in rapt attention, several people came and went beside me on the bench.  Every single one lost interest after a couple of minutes and reached for their cellphones, then sat and texted someone, or checked for mail, or whatever!  I wanted to ring their necks, or at the very least throw their phones to the ground and stomp them to pieces!  The attention-span of a goldfish, that's what we are working towards with all this technology that runs our lives, we are slaves to the machine!

Just yesterday I received my phone back from Matthew, who was lucky enough to get a brand new one, about which he is very happy.  I barely missed the thing.  There was only one time when I really could have used a phone, but even that time didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. 

 I missed everyone today, some days the missing part of your heart is very tender, as though someone had punched you hard in the chest, and the feelings well up in your eyes at inopportune moments, as an old song comes lilting through the car-radio, while you are driving on the highway with your perplexed son sitting next to you.  John Lennon's Happy Christmas (War is Over), Jessica's favourite song at the age of three, takes you back to the very place and time and emotion, Jess strolling around in that very self-contained way of hers, little blonde plaits, in dresses I had sewn for her myself, in the almost constant company of Mungo Jerry, her kitten.  Such a surge of love and longing goes through me, it takes everything I have to stay on the road, to focus on what is right in front of me.

So tonight my own typewriter image, an oil painting from long ago, unfortunately not in very good focus.